Bridging the Digital Divide: Building New Age Skills

July 20, 2017
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It’s a MAD, MAD, MAD world! That is, it is a Make All Digital world! While what is digital is still open to debate, to go or not to go digital is no more a question. Digital has permeated every aspect of our life and of business and at a pace that has caught many by surprise. Further, the impact of these technologies is no more restricted to the IT department. Its far reaching implications means that technology firms today need to “be digital” (as opposed to “do digital”) even as they help their clients go digital. And this calls for an immediate action plan to impart a new set of skills to academic talent pool so that they are future-ready, re-skill existing workforce to create a just-in-time deployable talent pipeline and up-skill technical workforce to shift from traditional, legacy systems to new-age digital technologies.

The pace at which these and newer technologies are emerging also means that one can no longer rest on one’s past laurels – we are now ushering in an age of continuous learning and evolution – key to maintaining our relevance and competitive edge.

India’s USD 154 billion strong technology industry has recognised these needs and has, over the last few years, focused on developing digital technology skills among its workforce:

It is not just the large & medium sized firms that have institutionalized learning programs, even small firms (100-1,000 employees) are also investing in developing these skills

The SMAC stack is the most sought after skillset across a cross-section of verticals; however, highly specialised technologies like AI/ML/NLP, complex robotics (think Elon Musk linking the brain with computers), IoT, etc. are taking centre-stage